In public and private cloud computing environments, applications and services are now being packaged in containers and/or virtual machines. Generally, containers are an abstraction at the application layer while virtual machines are an abstraction of physical hardware. In this regard, containers are organized on (i.e., reside on) a software container platform while virtual machines are organized on (i.e., reside on) a hypervisor. Both containers and virtual machines can isolate services or applications so that any processes or resources of a particular service or application are isolated from processes and resources of other services or applications that are all operating on a particular physical machine (i.e., a computing apparatus).
Since containers provide an abstraction at the application layer, containers provide a more lightweight solution as compared to virtual machines. Moreover, packaging an application or service (i.e., a software package) within a container may allow any number of tenants to access the software package. Consequently, containers may be preferable to virtual machines in at least some situations.